Frozen Cream Cheese Frosting Sandwich

So you made some pumpkin cupcakes or carrot cake last night, and topped it with cream cheese frosting, which everybody knows is the best thing ever.

And then...

...plot twist: There's leftover cream cheese frosting.

But wait! Before you stick your finger into the bowl or hold the piping nozzle over your mouth, run out to the shops (or open your cupboard if you're lucky enough) and grab a packet of digestive/tea biscuits – that's all you need for these frozen cream cheese frosting sandwiches.

Frozen Cream Cheese Frosting Sandwiches

makes ~15 sandwiches

3 tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 oz cream cheese, at room temperature

¾ cups icing sugar

¼ tsp vanilla extract

¼ tsp cinnamon (optional)

~30 digestive/tea biscuits

OR

how ever much cream cheese frosting you have left

how ever much digestive/tea biscuits is available to you

Instructions (really?)

To make the frosting:

1. In an electric mixer with a paddle attachment, (I used whisk attachments and it was fine) beat the butter and cream cheese on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 2-3 minutes.

2. Reduce the speed and gradually add icing sugar, beating until just incorporated.

3. Add vanilla and cinnamon until well combined.

4. Increase speed to medium high and beat until frosting is light and fluffy, about 1-2 minutes.

Assembly:

1.Pipe or spread cream cheese frosting generously on the flat side of one biscuit, leaving a little bit of space on the edges for the frosting to ooze out with pressure, and cover with the flat side of another.

2. Freeze for at least an hour.

The end product will be a sweet, delicious and moreish dessert snack which is super easy to make. The frosting hardens into an ice cream-like texture which holds itself well between the biscuits. Really, there's no excuse not to make these.

Wimbly Lu Chocolate Café

Exciting news of the day: One of the photographs from the previous post on Oreo Snickerdoodle Cookie Cake Bars made it onto foodgawker – at last! Admittedly, it was my fifteenth submission, but only the first successful one at that.

This can be due to the fact that my brother passed on to me his Canon DSLR camera a few days ago, along with two lenses: 50mm and 18-135mm. Proper food photography, here I come! (Hopefully)

So my birthday is on Wednesday. I'm a 9/11 baby, while my friend Janice is a 9/9 kid! It only made sense that two extreme foodies like us went to somewhere reputable for high tea.

We arrived about twenty minutes early to their opening time of 1PM, so we hung around the shophouses for a bit, where there were a few other bakeries and Western eating places, and also a cool-looking wooden table which gave Janice a flash of inspiration:

I know, I should totally go into portrait photography, right?

There's a lovely conservatory-style area at the back of the café, preceded by a dim but cosy seating area facing an open kitchen/bakery and chocolate display cabinet.

It was raining that day, and I actually suspect that they redecorate according to the season or occasion! My evidence: the staff were visibly buzzing around inside before they opened, and they could have been tweaking the decor! Also, I've seen pictures of the café filled with little hearts, all posted in February, as well as other similar pictures with Halloween lanterns. I'd be very impressed if they actually hung those raining clouds to reflect the weather outside! It really added a fantastic touch to Wimbly Lu's intimate and personal setting.

To make sure that we're having a legitimate lunch and not just stuffing our faces with desserts instead of having a proper meal, we ordered a double seafood and cheese toasty ($6) which was so-so.

Me made our next choice from having read other reviews and recommendations – waffle with salted caramel ice cream, plus a topping of maple syrup. ($8.50)

This waffle was pretty much perfect, it really hit that criteria of a crisp exterior and fluffy insides. From what I've heard, every single waffle served is just as perfect! Talk about quality control.

The salted caramel ice cream was delicious – flavourful but not sickeningly sweet. We definitely could have had a bigger scoop. The maple syrup was a good choice of topping as well.

Now I'm no expert on sticky date pudding, as this was my first one ever. I've got to say that it was delightful! Warm, gooey, sweet, and addictive. I only got to taste dates in my last mouthful, though. I'm not sure if sticky date puddings have to taste strongly of dates.

It would have made more sense for the dense, rich pudding to come with pouring cream or ice cream, but it didn't, so we ordered an addition scoop of honey cinnamon ice cream. ($3)

The cinnamon taste was a little stronger than expected, which was a surprise, but a good one – like apple pie in ice cream form! There wasn't much taste of honey, it was probably used mainly to sweeten. The ice cream flavour didn't go that well with the pudding. However, the texture was perfect in my terms. Not too icy, yet not too heavy and gooey – somewhere among that blissful in between. We found ourselves craving more of that honey cinnamon ice cream!

With service charge, the bill came to somewhere around $25 in total for the both of us, which is pretty reasonable for the great atmosphere and food. Wimbly Lu is definitely somewhere I'll return to for a relaxed dessert experience the next time I visit Singapore!

Wimbly Lu
15-2 Jalan Riang
Singapore 358987
Tel: 62891489
www.wimblylu.com

Princess of Wales

The Princess of Wales Pub is located near Primrose Hill, on a bright, wealthy residential street. A little challenging to get to, especially on a hot summer's day with the London Underground acting up on a typical weekend, forcing you to squeeze on replacement bus services with sweat clinging on to everything.

Colourful nearby houses

I decided to pay this particular pub – which is quite out of the way for me – a visit as a result of winning Zomato's weekly Write-For-A-Bite contest. (They did originally offer me £50 off my bill at Bacco's, but there was some complication with the restaurant, so they gave me £30 off The Princess of Wales instead.)

The view from atop Primrose Hill

The pub was quiet upon our arrival at 1.30pm. (The transport delayed us for an hour. Welcome to London!) The sun was shining, and the shutters were wide open. The place is wood-panelled all over, with the bar in the middle, and there's a cosy garden-basement just down the stairs.

English pubs are great for getting, well, English food. My sister ordered some chicken with gravy and a Yorkshire pudding, as it was Sunday, and they had roast specials with a live jazz band playing at 4pm! The chicken was tender, the gravy just-right, and the veggies soft and generous.

Her husband got a prawn salad with beetroot, which was part of the Sunday specials as a main, but it was quite a scarce portion for the price. (approx. £13)

I got grilled sea bass with potatoes, sliced courgette, and smoked mackerel pâté. The sea bass was very impressive – it had a tasty, crispy skin, and soft meat. The mackerel pâté was particularly interesting – smoky, fishy, tasty, but rather oily – and went well with the cool courgette salad.

By the time the jazz band started playing, the pub was filled and buzzed with summer, pint-induced liveliness. Dessert was a scoop of salted caramel-flavoured ice cream atop a nut-filled brownie. The brownie had rather hard edges, but a soft, cake-y inside. The salted caramel ice cream was so good, I was tempted to lick the plate clean.

We ended up with a bill of about £60, but the voucher helped to pay half of that. The Princess of Wales is a great place to chill and have drinks with friends. Sunday brings you more reasons to visit, due to the roast specials and the live jazz band. A walk afterwards on Primrose Hill followed by a nap under a tree – there was no better way to complete this particular summer Sunday.

The Princess of Wales

22 Chalcot Road

London NW1 8LL

0207 722 0354

Tutti Frutti UK

It's a real blessing to find an eating place in Soho where you can sit down for as long as you like without feeling like you should get up and leave so that you can make room for the people in the queue and escape the accusing stares of the staff.

Tutti Frutti has an entire funky basement filled with sofas, chairs, tables, books and board games which is a huge appeal for people who have time to kill whilst in the Soho area, or those who fancy a lengthy sit-down with friends over yummy dessert which won't make you feel too guilty.

There are about ten dispensers of different-flavoured frozen yogurt lining a wall in the shop, and these flavours vary day-to-day. Some which I have seen are Red Velvet, Blueberry, Kiwi, Soy, Nutella, Peanut Butter, Watermelon, Chocolate, and many more. Peanut Butter has got to be my favourite so far. They've got the full list on their website, but not all of these flavours are always available in shops.

The prices go by the final weight of your cup, at £1.85 per 100g. There are two cups to choose from, and the smaller one has an average price of £3.50 while you could expect to pay an approximate £5.50 for filling your froyo in the bigger one. Students get a discount of 10%, or 15% if your bill is over £10. (That would have to be a big cup of froyo, and no, getting two cups in the same bill wouldn't be very smart if you're a student.)

You can mix and match flavours, and I tend to sway towards those which aren't related to fruit, because the toppings which I choose afterwards are cookies and chocolate – you've got chocolate chips, mini oreos, chocolate chip cookies, buttery shortbread biscuits, Cadbury Flake, coconut shavings, ground peanuts, gummies, and all sorts of other stuff, it's hard to be short of options. Not too far away, they also have a healthier selection of toppings which includes grapes, pineapples, kiwis, and cubes of different fruits in general. I've been apprehensive to try, say, Nutella froyo with a topping of kiwi cubes, but I'll try to be adventurous in my next visit.

There's an app on the app store called Kooki which has a few loyalty cards from various eating places in London, and Tutti Frutti has got a card on there, which enables you a 6th cup of free froyo.

The shop also sells bubble tea, brownies and Malaysian pancakes. It really is a gem in the middle of Soho and I do recommend it, as there is something for everyone!

I just wish that they had awesome topping variations which can be used to make epic froyo architecture like this one which my friend did in Tutti Frutti Canada:

Tutti Frutti
2 Bedford Street
Covent Garden
London WC2E 9HH
United Kingdom
info@tfuk-froyo.co.uk
www.tfuk-froyo.co.uk/

Afters Ice Cream Parlour

I went to Croydon about a week ago to meet up with some friends. And by friends I mean fellow human beings, not just that ice cream shop I've always wanted to go to.

Afters Original Ice Cream Parlour has branches in Walthamstow, Leyton, Ilford, Green Street, Tooting and Croydon, and their menu boasts ice cream, milkshakes, cakes, waffles, juice, and is apparently the only ice cream franchise in London to utilize a cold stone to prepare ice cream.

When you first get through the tinted glass doors at the Croydon branch, you are hit with a blast of pink coming from all surfaces of the parlour. It was about 3 in the afternoon on a Sunday, and the place was almost empty, but several young families came in for sundaes towards the evening time.

The menu was a bit of a shocker for scrimping students like me, as sundaes each cost roughly £7, and my "waffle served with a sauce and one scoop of your choice" was £4.45. The dessert came occupying only half the plate, making the portion look smaller. My waffle was drizzled with maple syrup, and I chose a scoop of Kinder Bueno-flavoured ice cream to go with it.

The waffle was fragrant and yummy, especially with the maple syrup, but it could have been warmer. The ice cream had a nice, freshly-scooped-from-the-tub, creamy texture, but I would have liked the hazelnut flavour to have been more present throughout, and not only when I managed to bite on a piece of the crushed bar. When I didn't, all I got was a dairy, milky taste.

The waffle wasn't enough, and I contemplated between the array of tempting cakes and other ice cream flavours, before deciding to get a scoop of Ferrero Rocher-flavoured ice cream. Yes, I just got dessert for my dessert. Don't look at me like that.

It was better than the Kinder Bueno scoop in terms of consistent taste, and I really got the hazelnut taste all around.

Afters is a great place to go to when London finally decides to stop raining on us. The retro jukebox and pink booths make for a nice place to chill out over cakes, milkshakes, ice cream, waffles, juice – whatever you need when you have a guilty dessert craving and a Sunday afternoon to spare.


Afters Original Ice Cream Parlour
58 South End
South Croydon
Surrey
CR0 1DP
Tel: 0207 998 1643

Magnum no. 5 Stolen Kiss: Tarte Aux Pommes

Spring is here, and anyone who has been faced with six months of gloom, rain, sleet and howling wind will find any possible opportunity to have an ice cream.

Or maybe it's just me.

The 9th of April was a good day all around the UK.

I enjoyed the scoop of 'Vermonster' flavoured ice cream from the Ben & Jerry's at Leicester Square's Odeon, which is a maple syrup ice cream with pecans and a caramel swirl. Such lovely flavours in that ice cream... there really is nothing else to say about Ben & Jerrys' ice cream, other than 'yum.'

This caught my eye in Tesco Express because a) it was in a fancy green box b) it is packaged and named like a fragrance and c) tarte aux pommes means apple tart, ooh yeah.

A little bit coffin-like in presentation, but I was delighted to see that the chocolate coating was white.

The only other time I've had apple pie-flavoured ice cream was when I had a mini cup of Ben & Jerry's Oh My! Apple Pie, a vanilla ice cream containing chunks of apple and pie crust. It fared well, but Magnum one-upped that by coating a similar mixture with cinnamon-infused white chocolate, which really enhances and completes the taste of an apple pie/tarte.

If I had an endless stomach pit + insane metabolism + immunity to fat + all other physical traits I can't have, I would have this ice cream everyday!

McFlurry

Because I don't bring my digital camera everywhere I go, I have to improvise with Instagram, the infamous iPhone hobby which takes up more of my time than I should probably allow.

McFlurry® flavours vary all around the world and this is one informative revelation you get when moving to another country. In Singapore, you have the basic Oreo McFlurry ($2) and the occasional promotional flavour, such as crème brulée or chocolate macaron.

McDonald's in the UK provides a variety of Dairy Milk Chocolate, Cadbury® Crunchie, or Smarties crushed into the usual vanilla soft-serve ice cream, and there are also promotional flavours, and the current one is the Cadbury Creme Egg, which makes up a lot of every year's Easter craze.

This flavour is only available up till the 30th of April. Although I don't fancy the actual Creme Egg chocolates that much, I give a yes to this one – the fondant-y, sweet Creme Egg flavour is brought out nicely and complimented by the ice cream, which helps to dilute it, in a sense, helping it to spread its richness around. (I can not find the prices of any of McDonald's foods online – or sometimes even in its branches, for that matter. It annoys me. The Cadbury Creme Egg McFlurry costs somewhere between £1 and £1.50. Yes, I will keep records next time.)

The only annoying thing was that the McFlurry ice cream from the McDonald's near the Jubilee Line entrance at London Waterloo station was melting like there was no tomorrow! It was a cold day (this is London, mind you) and even an average McFlurry ice cream in Singapore (tropical over-sunny island) would take quite a while to melt.

However, the McDonald's in Hammersmith Broadway Shopping Centre was fine, where I bought one with Cadbury Crunchie bits in it. (Cheaper than the promotional McFlurry. 99p, maybe?) Cadbury Crunchie is a chocolate bar with a honeycomb and toffee centre. Although the flavours were really nice, I do wish they were more Crunchie bits in it. I saw stickers on the topping dispensers which stated the amount of times the staff member was supposed to slide the lever, and it was only '1' for all of them – whyyyy!

Pizza, scotch eggs and apple crumble

The following is an insight on how three girls enjoy a Friday night with movie and food.

First we spend the whole week fantasizing about how we would add stuff like corn, pepperoni, mushroom, olives, ham, pineapple, minced meat etc. onto some awesome cheese-filled-crust pizza dough and put it in the oven for an epic Sunday movie-night, but then other plans arise and we are at Tesco at 6pm on a Friday night after a long day at school, lazy to knead dough and discovering that there is no pre-made pizza dough available in the gigantic Tesco in Twickenham.

We give up and scan the chilled ready-to-bake pizzas which were selling at 3 for £5 – perfect, one for each of us.

DJ P-Zah tears it up!

We threw these together in the oven while setting up a DVD of The Help. 12 mini scotch eggs went into the oven too – it was our first time trying these British appetizers, which are boiled eggs wrapped in sausage meat, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. I wonder why the person who invented this wasn't satisfied with a boiled egg and had to coat it with all sorts of gunk.

Dissection of a scotch egg

One of my friends didn't quite like the egg, but I did. It was just a little pleasant treat with a nice crusty touch, and I'm looking forward to tasting real scotch eggs, which aren't from Tesco, someday. Those that look like this.

The pizza was really satisfying as well. They baked well in the oven, and had great tastes, and loaded with ingredients. The 'deep-dish' one just happened to have a thicker base rather than more ingredients, just a heads up.

'Meat feast'

Although we each had a pizza, it is a universal, mutual agreement that there is always room for dessert. Tesco's Bramley Apple Crumble comes in a box like this:

Months ago, we removed the paper sleeve and placed the plastic box into the oven, which warped. So this time, we scooped it out of the container, which kind of ruined it, but we didn't care because this Bramley Apple Crumble is so good, especially when topped with vanilla ice cream. (~£1 for a container the size of three-ish bricks)

Apologies for the lousy picture, I didn't want the ice cream to melt.

I haven't had much apple crumble before, because I've only just recently become a baked-apple fan, but I really do love Tesco's Bramley Apple Crumble. The crumble is sweet and crunchy, and the filling is plentiful, warm and yummy. The warm mess combined with simple vanilla ice cream is the perfect dessert, especially with all the different textures.

I felt 9 months pregnant after eating dessert, because the freezer was too small for ice cream, so we had to finish it, therefore I kept on dolloping spoonfuls of ice cream onto my crumble.

(Long, satisfied 'ahh')